Whamit!

Šišóka Bendickson: Háu Mitákuyepi. Šišókaduta emákiyapi dó. Hello my relatives. I am called Šišókaduta. You can shorten that to Šišóka. I am a first year student in the MITILI program. I am an enrolled tribal member from the Lake Traverse Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. I am an L2 speaker of the Santee Dakota dialect. There are no official estimates of how many Dakota speakers are left, but I would guess there are less than 300 L1 speakers. I studied Dakota language at the University of Minnesota and graduated with my BA in American Indian Studies. I worked with L1 speakers to improve my proficiency. Then I taught beginning and intermediate Dakota courses at the UMN for a decade. Before coming to MIT, I worked with Dakota and Lakota language non-profit organizations on dictionaries, classes, and learning materials. My goals are to document fluent speakers, create materials for the language community, conduct research, and work towards total revitalization of the Dakota language. During my time in the MITILI program I want to learn about linguistics generally, and more specifically about syntax and morphology. I want to apply the knowledge I gain at MIT towards my goals of documentation and revitalization of the Dakota language. I like to cook, spend time with my family, attend Dakota ceremonies, and travel. Tókšta akhé!

Mícheál Curtin [‘mih?l]: Beannachtaí an fhomhair oraibh! I am an Irish speaker and a first-year student on the MITILI program. Thus far, my career and training have been in applied theatre. For the last nine years I have been directing a drama education program for high school students in New York City, where I led a team of Actor/Teachers who use theatre as a teaching tool in public schools. In Ireland, I have led programming with elders and young people alike in support of the language revitalization movement there. I have an MA in Applied Theatre from CUNY. At MIT, I hope to gain skills that enrich my work in Ireland. I look forward to learning from other folks who have worked on revitalizing languages in other contexts. I’m originally from Brooklyn, NY and enjoy archery, Survivor, running, and board games. 

Mehment Can Dadan: Hi everyone, I am Can (he/him) with a [d?]. I am from Turkey and got my B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from Bo?aziçi University. I am interested in phonetics and phonology, particularly in vowel harmony and stress. Other than linguistics, I enjoy watching films and talking/venting about them as well as photography. Nowadays, I am trying to learn how to play bass.

Churong Jin: Hi all! I’m Jin, originally from Beijing, China. I’m interested in semantics, and some topics that have been on my mind include neg-raising, event semantics, inquisitive semantics, and probability operators. Prior to joining MIT, I did my undergrad at UCLA in math and philosophy, and worked as an RA at the Meaning Lab at USC. Lifting, running, hiking, reading and playing video games constitute most of my life outside of academics, other than, of course, hanging out and going on spontaneous adventures with friends. I’m currently most excited about branching out to areas of linguistics beyond semantics, and my side quest is to run the Boston Marathon before I graduate.

Ogloo Jurkhaichin: I’m Ogloo, and I’m originally from Inner Mongolia, China. My main interests are in syntax and morphology, especially the ways they interact with each other and with other components of grammar. Most of my work so far has focused on Mongolian, and I’m interested in using data from Mongolian and related languages to think about broader questions in linguistic theory. Before starting the PhD program, I was a student in MIT’s Indigenous Languages Initiative, or MITILI, here in the department, so I’ve actually already been around for the past two years. I’m really excited to continue working on these questions and to explore some new directions during the PhD. 

Rowan Levick: Hi everyone! I’m Rowan (they/them). I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and got my BA in linguistics from William & Mary in Virginia. I’m primarily interested in the phonetics phonology interface and experimental work with children and adults. I’ve done research on acoustic phonetics of nasals, vowel length perception in young children, and I worked for a developmental neurolinguistics lab at UT Dallas where we mainly studied individual differences in children’s word learning abilities. Outside of linguistics I play a lot of ultimate frisbee and enjoy glassblowing, cooking, and a good chat with friends.

A new meeting group for people in the department who are engaged in experimental or computational work, or who are interested in learning more about these approaches: the (provisionally named) Experimental & Computational Methods in Linguistics group, or ECML!

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)

Title: Some Aspects of Bantu Morphology, featuring Leland Paul Kusmer (2019)

Time: Thursday, September 10th, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: Discussion on verbal morphology in Bantu, focusing on the conjoint/disjoint alternation, where a verb’s surface realization depends on its syntactic, information-structural, or prosodic relation to what follows it. I’ll walk through some of the core Bantu facts and compare them with similar patterns in the French Creole languages I work on. I’ll then present Kusmer’s (2019) analysis of the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Tshiven?a. Unlike more familiar Bantu systems, the two morphological variants of a verb are not straightforwardly in complementary distribution in this language: some linguistic environments permit either form. The paper reports results from an experiment testing speakers’ choices across different syntactic contexts. Kusmer suggests that the variation in Tshiven?a may track prosodic phrasing. I’ll use these results as a starting point for further discussion of how we should understand the relationship between prosody and morphological exponence.

Course announcements in this post:

• Special Topics: “Doing Experimental Linguistics” (24.S95)
• More Advanced Syntax (24.955)
• Topics in Phonology: Phonetics and phonology in generative grammar (24.964)
• Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)
• Topics in Semantics: Presupposition, Anaphora, and Reference (24.979)

24.S95: Special Topics: “Doing Experimental Linguistics”

• Instructor: Shota Momma
• Time: Tuesday, 2pm-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

As the title suggests, the goal of this course is to design and carry out an experimental project, either individually or in groups. Through this process, you will learn the fundamentals of experimental design and data analysis as used in experimental syntax, semantics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. I currently plan to spend the first half of each class covering core concepts in experimental methods and statistics, along with discussion of relevant papers, and the second half working on student projects (going through materials together, discussing specifics of designs, etc). One concrete goal of the course is to submit an abstract (individually or as a group) to a psycholinguistics conference (e.g., HSP: https://www.hspsociety.org/). The deadline for HSP is typically in late November/early December, so we may be able to aim for that if things go well.

24.955: More Advanced Syntax

• Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou
• Time: Thursday, 2pm-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Phonetics and phonology in generative grammar

• Instructor: Edward Flemming
• Time: Friday, 10am-1pm
• Location: 32-D461

Standard models of the grammar of linguistic sound divide it into two components, phonetics and phonology, but many questions about this division remain open. The goal of this seminar is to explore some of these questions. For example:

• Where is the dividing line between phonetics and phonology, and why?
• What information is passed from the phonology to the phonetics? Just the output of the phonology? Underlying representations? Information about the system of contrasts?
• Are there inputs to the phonetics that do not come from the phonology? E.g. speech rate, hyper-/hypoarticulation.
• Does any information flow from the phonetics to the phonology? Does the phonology anticipate language-specific aspects of phonetic realization?
• Are these components organized serially? If so, are there opaque interactions between them?

24.981 Topics in Computational Phonology

• Instructor: Adam Albright
• Time: Wednesday, 10am-1pm
• Location: 32-D831

Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be learned from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. Finally, modeling has played an increasingly important role in modeling gradient experimental data, since it provides a way of comparing human behavior with statistical properties of linguistic input, filtered through a possibly non-trivial learning procedure.

This class is intended to provide an introduction to the theory and practice of computational models of phonology.  We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds.  Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning early phonological acquisition.

Topics may include: (subject to substantial revision, according to needs or interests of participants)

• Statistical “baseline” models (n-gram models, exemplar models)
• Algorithms for constraint weighting and constraint ranking (recursive constraint demotion, biased constraint demotion, the GLA; perceptron learning and maximum entropy weighting)
• Algorithms for constraint discovery (Albright and Hayes 2006; Hayes and Wilson 2008)
• Integrating learned and innate constraints
• Bayesian inference for phonology and morphology
• Models of morphological decomposition and morphological productivity

The course is also designed to provide opportunities for hands-on experience in various aspects of using and developing models, including preparing training data, running simulations, and interpreting their results. No background in programming or machine learning is assumed.
*** Depending on interests and goals of students, we may experiment with AI-assisted coding this semester

Course requirements:

• Weekly readings
• Participation in class discussions
• Written assignments (small problem sets)
• Final project (presentation + writeup)

24.979 Topics in Semantics: Presupposition, Anaphora, and Reference

• Instructor: Amir Anvari, Danny Fox, Martin Hackl
• Time: Wednesday, 10am-1pm
• Location: 32-D461

In this seminar we will explore various issues in the theory of presupposition, discourse anaphora and reference. We will begin with the theory of local accommodation which we think will interact in interesting ways with more general questions in the theory of presupposition, anaphora and reference. Our starting point will be puzzles pertaining to the meaning of gender features (reading Bobaljik and Zocca 2010 and Merchant 2013) which we will use to introduce a novel proposal for local accommodation (Doron, Fox, Wehbe). From there we will move to other explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites, discourse anaphora, definites vs. demonstratives and free pronouns, to name a few.

Requirements:

• Class participation and presentations
• A final paper

Rough and tentative list of topics (not necessarily in chronological order):

1. Local Accommodation, Strong-Weak Triggers, Trivalence vs. Two-dimensional semantics
2. Presupposition Projection
3. Competition and Markedness
4. Indefinites and anaphora
5. Predicates and Formulas
6. Reference resolution with definite descriptions, demonstratives and (free) pronouns

Our recent MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI) graduate Will Pacheco has joined the University of New Mexico’s Linguistics program, pursuing a PhD by way of an MA in Linguistics. UNM has a strong language documentation program, and Will is excited to be home to continue his research on Kewa Keres with the community, building on an interest in phonetics and phonology that was strongly shaped by his conversations with Edward Flemming. Inspired by Amy Li, et al., Will is also starting a spectrogram reading group at UNM. Will has also joined RURAL (Resources for Understanding, Revitalizing, and Advancing Languages) as a Research Assistant, which provides monthly language documentation training for community members and teachers from endangered language communities across New Mexico, covering topics such as an introduction to linguistics and audio and video recording techniques. Will hopes to maintain his connections to MITILI and MIT Linguistics and is grateful to everyone in the department for their support during his time at MIT.

Congratulations, Will! We are so pround of you!

The 36th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) was held at the University of Buenos Aires on July 29 – 31, 2026.  Current and former members of our department at the conference included:

Faculty: 

• Viola Schmitt gave an invited talk: Individuation, generalized

Students:

• Haoming Li & Yizhen Jiang: Infelicity of negated bare plurals: Not presupposition, but Partition by Exhaustification
• James Xinyu Gu & Churong Jin: An unlikely semantics for ‘likely’

Alums: 

• Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002)[University of Toronto] & Anastasia Tsilia (PhD 2026)[University of Illinois]: What if and its kin
• Dmitry Privoznov (PhD 2021)[University of Göttingen]: Static semantics and “dynamic” pragmatics: Once more on double negation
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (PhD 2025)[Queen Mary University]: “Remind-me” presuppositions with iterated Speech Acts
• Anna Carolina Almeida, Raimundo Cox-Casals & Michael Wagner (PhD 2005)[McGill]: Adjectival agreement is interpretable: Evidence from summative agreement in Mexican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese
• Paul Marty (PhD 2017)[University of Lisbon], Patrick Elliott, Alexandros Kalomoiros & Jacopo Romoli: Quantifying multiplicity
• Paloma Jereti?, Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS/Ben Gurion University], Aurore Gonzalez, Andreea Nicolae, Kazuko Yatsushiro & Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998)[ZAS]: Not all scalar implicatures are derived from utterable alternatives: evidence from child language acquisition
• Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013)[CUNY]: Local contexts in formal alternatives
• Vincent Rouillard (PhD 2023)[Laval University]: Until and Incremental Homogeinity

MIT Linguistics was represented at the 4th Paris Workshop on Game Theory and Language from June 11-12, by first-year student Orr Well, who gave a talk entitled “Ineffability Follows from a Question-Based Approach to Focus”, and third-year student Alma Frischoff, who gave a talk entitled “A General Account of Exhaustification with an Iterated Rationality Model”.

On June 23, 2026, the 33rd meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 33) at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand. Our first-year student Joseph Sarmenta presented a poster entitled Ng is n- + ang: A Reanalysis of Tagalog Argument Markers.

Congratulations to Adam Chong (University of Oxford), our student Bingzi Yu, and our alum Youngah Do (PhD 2013)[HKU], whose paper “Conservativity in the scope of phonological generalization learning” has been accepted to Linguistic Vanguard and published online.

You can read the paper here. Below is the abstract:

Phonological alternations that arise due to morphological concatenation often serve to enforce static phonotactic generalizations within the lexicon. Due to this close link, knowledge about alternations and phonotactics are encoded using a single mechanism in constraint-based models like Optimality Theory. Evidence of this link in learning, however, is equivocal. In this study we examine whether learners readily extend a generalization from alternations to phonotactics. Learners were trained on consonant harmony alternations that involved harmony between a suffix and stem consonant, while stems were ambiguous in terms of phonotactic generalizations. We then examined whether learners extended the alternation generalization to phonotactic judgments about novel stems. While learners successfully learned the alternations in training, they failed to extend this generalization to phonotactic judgments about novel stems. Taken together with previous findings, our results suggest that learners are conservative in extending learned generalizations to unseen morphological contexts. Overall, these results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might not be as tight as previously suggested.

We are delighted to announce the publication of our colleague Elise Newman’s paper, “On Projection and the Shadow of [Wh]”, in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations, Elise!

Here is the abstract: 

Much work has shown that wh-movement is subject to several kinds of locality restrictions cross-linguistically. I propose that these restrictions arise when [wh] projects past the maximal projection that it came from. When this happens, it intervenes for wh-movement, trapping the wh-element in its base position, unless it can escape through other means. The need to escape the domain of [wh] is proposed to capture the distribution of successive-cyclic movement and interactions with Voice in different languages. Different locality conditions in different languages are captured by different distributions of the same features and probes.

The paper is open access: https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.564

We are pleased to share that Nikos Angelopoulos (CNRS) and our student Anastasia Tsilia have published a paper in Snippets, entitled “No two complementizers are the same: Insights from Greek”!

You can read the paper here.

The 20th meeting of Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 20) was held in Montréal, Québec, Canada from June 26–28, 2026, with satellite workshops on June 25 and 29, and a keynote lecture on June 25. MIT linguistics was well represented by the following current students and faculty:

• Edward Flemming (Faculty) & Amy Li (3rd year): Deriving phonetic realizations from the interaction of target constraints and constraints on articulatory dynamics
• Cynthia Zhong (5th year): Predictors of tone sandhi in Mandarin-English bilingual speech
• Bingzi Yu (4th year) & Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018)[Tel Aviv]: Learning attested and unattested opaque interactions in the lab

And by our alumns:

• Suyeon Yun (PhD 2016)[Chungnam National University]: Acquired, not innate: The role of English exposure in sonority sequencing principle sensitivity
• Riccardo Orrico, Bowei Shao & Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010)[Ecole Normale Supérieure, DEC]: Stress-induced articulation effects on post-tonic consonants
• Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010)[Ecole Normale Supérieure, DEC] & Riccardo Orrico: Lexical stress and phonemic perception: The roles of acoustics and attention
• Feng-Fan Hsieh (PhD 2007)[National Tsing Hua University], Jian-Leat Siah, Yueh-Chin Chang & Sam Zukoff (PhD 2018)[UC San Diego]: Gradient Overapplication in Malay Reduplication: Direct Aerodynamic Evidence for Base-Reduplicant Correspondence
• Yueh-Chin Chang & Feng-Fan Hsieh (PhD 2007)[National Tsing Hua University]: How Vowel-Like Is a Nucleus?Ultrasound Evidence for Gradient Articulatory Vowelhood
• Chao Han, Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto], Juhyung Cho, Tae-Won Lim, Say Young Kim & Philip
  Monahan: The functional status of f0 shapes the neural encoding of English stop voicing contrasts: Evidence from Korean and English listeners
• Hassan Khan, Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto] & Dave Kush: Gender perception varies with consonant sonority in Urdu nonce copy
• Juhyung Cho & Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto]: Clear speech effect on the perception of English /i-?/ by English and Korean listeners
• Xinyu Liao, Hironori Katsuda & Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto]: Do long vowels lead sound change? Perceptual learning of vowel shifts in Japanese
• Jack Mahlmann, Samuel Akinbo, Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto] & Agnes Legbeti: Iconicity of tonal and vowel disharmony in English and Yoruba